Neither Grammy nor her dad had graduated, so what did it matter if Matty didn’t?
Sighing, she turned away from the board.
Grady locked eyes with her briefly, but she ducked her head and scooped up her empty food container to throw it out.
“Ready to start the day?”
He looked like he wanted to say something but only said, “Ready if you are.”
Relieved, she opened the door and motioned for him to go.
“Ladies first.”
That earned her a light punch to the shoulder, and they laughed as they left the station.
Chapter two
Chapter Two
“Fuck,” hissed Reese Lloyd as she hit her foot, not for the first time, on a pile of junk on the floor. She was more pissed off that it happened again than from the pain.
She wasn’t even sure what it was that she had hit. The whole damned house was nothing but a trap. A large, haunting death trap that she was sure her dead mother had set up just to make her life even more difficult.
It would be just like her to make life hard even after she died.
Joyce Walton was three months dead but ever-present in Reese’s life. She could just hear her voice hollering into the room.
“Damn it, Joyce. You couldn’t have hoarded pillows?”
Huffing and certainly not waiting for a reply, Reese rubbed her knee to soothe away the pain before picking her bag and purse back up from where they had landed on the floor when she had accidentally slammed her knee. She was on a tight schedule. No time to argue with the dead.
Not for the first time that week did she wonder why she was there. Why had she decided to move? Why did she think this was a good idea? Why didn’t she just take Haley up on living in her basement temporarily?
Pride, mostly. And pure spite.
One week ago, she arrived at 521 Gimlet Avenue with all her belongings packed into her car and a front seat full of Walmart bags of cleaning supplies, a little food, and toilet paper because she didn’t trust anything in that house to touch her most private of parts.
One week, and all she had managed to do was rake out a small path up the stairs to her old bedroom and then to the bathroom. A bathroom, she quickly realized, was not going to work for her. The toilet worked once she could get to it and the sink, after takingforty-five minutes to clean it and the counter off, but the shower didn’t work at all. Not a drop.
Her mother’s hoarding had hit its highest peak while she was gone. Reese had left Roark, Tennessee, fifteen years ago and hadn’t been back. During that time, Joyce had managed to completely ruin the house. The only reason Reese had returned was because the estate needed closing, and she had finally accepted there was nothing left for her in Lexington, Kentucky. She had lived and worked there the whole time she’d been gone, trying to make a life for herself. A few relationships had come and gone, but none of them lasted. Reese never seemed able to open up enough to let anyone fully in, and eventually they all fizzled out. In the end, the only real connection she had left there was Haley. Then came the call that Joyce had died, and the life Reese had built no longer felt like it was enough to stay for.
So there she was, with a backpack full of toiletries and her pride hanging by a thread, as she tossed her stuff into the passenger seat of her SUV to drive fifteen minutes across town just to take a shower.
Not for the first time did she silently thank whoever was in charge for her best friend of twenty-five years, Haley.
The trip across town was fairly quick for a busy Monday morning. Lots of things had changed about Roark but also hadn’t really. It was odd. It felt the same, but it also now had a twenty-four-hour Walmart and a coffee shed. Yes, a coffee shed. It was a Home Depot shed converted into a coffee business with drive-through windows on both sides. And the coffee was surprisingly good.
She arrived at Haley’s at half past seven with coffee, a banana nut muffin, and a backpack in hand. The whitewashed brick two-story house with caramel-brown wood posts and shutters wasn’t Reese’s taste, but she had no room to judge. She had a two-story bungalow filled with at least forty years of junk and garbage and not a working shower.
She knocked twice on the side door before letting herself in and slipped her feet out of her shoes. A strict rule in the Palmer household. It was shockingly quiet when she moved further in, except for a gentle tune playing from speakers she couldn’t find.
The smell of chocolate chip pancakes hit her almost immediately.
“Yum,” she declared as she came around to the kitchen.
Haley, dressed in gray sweats and her long auburn hair up in a chaotic mess of a bun, turned to her, a smudge of flour on her smiling face. “Hello, sunshine.”
“Good morning. You’re awfully domestic today.”
